Arkansas Tech University has squeezed all the blood that it can out of the turnip of state funding for higher education. Now the students have to bleed a little more.

Next fall, students will begin paying more in tuition and mandatory fees. A student taking a load of 12 credit hours will pay about 11 percent more each semester, while a student taking a more typical 15 hours will pay almost 17 percent more.

In essence, Tech and its students are being punished for their success. The university has grown by leaps and bounds; new buildings are popping up like spring flowers, the graduation rate is one of the best in the state, and is providing the college graduates that the state so desperately needs.

But that very growth of students has outstripped the financial help provided by the state, leaving Tech with the lowest per-student state aid among four-year colleges.

As Dr. Robert C. Brown, Tech's president, noted last week, pretty soon Tech won't be a state-supported university; it will only be a state-assisted university.

The increase need not be permanent. Brown told Thursday's board of trustees meeting that the increase could be rescinded if state lawmakers come up with a more equitable funding formula.

Several years ago, the board approved a fee on students to retire bonds for a modest new library. When the Don Reynolds Foundation provided a grant for the much larger Pendergraft Library and Technology Center, Brown went back to the board to remove that fee. The school even gave refunds to summer students who had already paid it.

The likelihood of additional state funding seems remote. Any status quo tends to stay just that because change is difficult, not to mention painful. Imposing a more sensible balance for funding would raise the amount of money going to Tech, but other schools with stagnant enrollments would see their funding go down.

The other possibility, baking a larger pie so Tech could get a fair share, seems nigh impossible considering the demands on the state budget for things like court-ordered school reforms.

Politicians are just as much into pain avoidance as the rest of us, and leaving Tech alone to struggle through seems more likely than spreading the pain among some other schools.

Which makes the increase inevitable for students, including the two from this writer's household who will be attending this fall.

Knowing that something is inevitable never really makes it any easier to bear.

Even knowing that the extra fees will provide a raise for faculty and staff at the university can't change the reality of the extra money that students must earn or borrow.

About the only option left is lobbying state leaders to restore some sense of rationality to the higher education funding formula.

Life may not be fair, but that rarely stops people from crying out against unfairness.